Tangentially related to the article, but it mentions the Rebekah Jones story, which has been thoroughly dissected here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...
- She was a low level GIS developer working on the state dashboard
- After repeatedly posting internal data on personal social media accounts, she was asked to stop and her responsibilities were changed
- She escalated by intentionally sabotaging the rest of the team's work, locking other employees out by removing their security credentials, and by moving data out of the system, crashing the dashboard
- Even after discovery, she was not terminated, and an arrangement was established to have her go through consulting with management
- She then sent an email to everyone working on the dashboard falsely asserting she was being fired for not manipulating the dashboard, which was picked up by the press immediately. In response, she was actually terminated within a couple days.
- Her story, early on, waffled on whether the dashboard was accurate or not, and at times she asserted it was indeed transparent and accurate. Over the last year the story has evolved to the point where she now has a long list of individuals and organizations who apparently have conspired to falsify data.
- She claimed that she was raided by police last year to confiscate her laptop containing data the state didn't want getting out, during which the police waived a gun at her husband and children. However, it turned out she was related entirely unrelated to her work, and they were raiding the house because she had stolen the data of 19,000 employees of the Florida Department of Health from her home, and they traced the IP address there. She also took a video of the encounter in which she waived a sign saying "Biden Hire Me". And bodycam footage from the officers disproved her claims of guns being waived at her family.
- Using her fame and story about being a "whistleblower", she has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars online
- She continues to maintain her own dashboard, but admits she produces it using the same data source that the official state of Florida dashboard does. The difference in what they show is in their methodology for processing the raw data, but other epidemiologists and data scientists claim she clearly overcounts things like deaths and cases due to obvious errors, like counting both PCR positive tests and positive anti-body tests, which would include many vaccinated individuals and double count individuals who take both tests, as well miscalculating "excess deaths".
Apparently she also has long history of felonies/misdemeanor charges including a trial ongoing since 2019 in which she is accused of stalking her previous boyfriend. Hard to say how relevant it is to the dashboard fiasco, but at the very least makes it seem like she is an unstable individual.
At any rate, in addition to the unrelated trials, she is now awaiting trial for the data breach, as a judge signed a warrant for her arrest after reviewing the evidence seized in the aforementioned police raid.
> But it’s not true. Indeed, it’s nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster.
I think this is one of the greatest flaws of current journalism: By increasing the "feel good value" for its intended audience and confirming their respective biases, an author can completely disenfranchise readers coming from a different point of view.
You and me were both repulsed by the sweeping statements and lack of nuance and, since time is precious and the article looked like yet another propaganda tool, you rejected its value. Rightly so.
Yet in it where description that were correct and pointed to a deeper issue of whom we believe and why.
So by writing for just a section of a possible audience any discussion is impossible.
I won't read the National Review (just this article) and thus their content will be irrelevant to any good discussion I'll have in the future.